“And yet here they all are, Dave, all sixty million, crammed into this fragile little country of theirs, and all of them looking to me for guidance. Maybe there is no such thing as government.” He looked at his hands. “No such thing as power. Look at us. We couldn’t even manage the economy, if truth be told. And now, this plague from space, this natural disaster, has shown us up for what we are. Posturing puppets.”

“But we carry on,” Holland said. In fact he understood how Fames felt. He’d had to wrestle with this in his own demons, and he’d stiffened his resolve, and he’d come to believe every word he said now. “We do what we can. We keep on trying until the ground opens up under Whitehall.”

“Like Churchill. At the gates of Buckingham Palace, facing off the Germans with his tommy gun.”

“That’s the spirit. We save what we can. We govern. We let the country carry on in an orderly way, as long as we possibly can.”

“But what’s the point, Dave? What’s the point if this—” He waved a thin hand into the darkness. “—if this bloody black meteor is heading straight for us?”

Holland hesitated, considering a morale-boosting, upbeat answer. But Fames was clearly beyond that.

At last he said: “Dignity.”

“What?”

“Dignity. When you come down to it, what else is there, for any of us?”

Fames reflected on that for a long time.

Holland found himself shivering. The traffic noise was dying to its minimum, as the small hours approached.

Holland hated to be awake at such a time, the dead of night when the horrors arose, the fears of powerlessness and mortality which seemed to be overwhelming Fames now, which could be banished during the day with its illusions of light and movement and control…

Fames said, “I’m planning to resign, Dave.”

That startled him. “You can’t. Not now.”

“I must. This is all too—” He waved his hands again. “—too big for me. I’m done for, Dave. You take it, if you want.”

Despite himself, despite the circumstances, Holland felt a deep, atavistic thrill at the words.

Power, real power, at last. He became intensely aware of where he was, poised above the chambers he could soon command, surrounded by the machinery of state, as if he was the huge, ugly Victorian mechanism which drove Big Ben itself.

He tried to focus his mind on Fames, the suffering man before him.

“There will have to be an election,” he said.

“You must do as you see fit.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Holland said. “How could it have been?”

“But it was on my watch.”

There was a sound like thunder, or distant guns, far to the north.

Both men clung to the balustrade, staring towards Scotland, trying to pick out a change in the light.

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